Posted
by
timothy
on Tuesday May 24, 2011 @06:11PM
from the for-that-much-money-they-better dept.

kkleiner writes "The University of Chicago's new $81 million Joe and Rika Mansueto Library is being referred to as the library of the future. You enter the library and find there are hardly any books, just a large reading room with computers. The library's 3.5 million books are stored inside 35,000 bins stacked within 50 foot tall racks in a massive 5-story chamber underneath the library. When you ask for a book an automated retrieval system involving huge, computer-activated robotic cranes finds the book you want, delivers it to the circulation desk, and eventually puts it back underground when you return it." The age of the personal-shopping library robot is getting closer and closer.

How much would it have cost to Digitize everything for the Kindle? Contract Google and reCAPTCHA and get everything digitized. It'd probably fit into a single 3.5" hard drive. Books really don't making sense in this situation. Especially spending 81M on a big storage unit. What happens when the water barrier fails and takes out the entire library?

Does the Internet have a copy of "Proceedings and plans for the completion of the Chicago, St. Paul & Fond du Lac Rail-Road, from Chicago to Oshkosh", published in 1859? (http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/3577896) No? Didn't think so. How about "Sturiella minor: a fossil plant showing structure from the Carboniferous of Illinois", a UChicago student thesis from 1924? (http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/4512895) No? Didn't think so.

If your response is "who would ever need to know that kinda crap?", you don't understand the first thing about academic research. If your response is "why not just digitize these and put them online?" then you'll be glad to know that they built a digitization lab as part of this new library to do exactly that. But that work takes time. Years.

The Internet is great, but some things aren't on the Internet. Some things are very very hard to put on the Internet, due to copyright issues, age issues, and manpower problems. The Internet, for all its glory, often actually *reduces* the variety of information available: have you noticed that when you Google something, the first hit is Wikipedia, and the rest of the page is people plagiarizing Wikipedia? It's crucial that information networks from the past be integrated into the network of the present, or we stand to lose our history.

Along with the fact that not everyone can afford a kindle, or the price tag on some books. It's not like I can spend $100 on a book just for a college paper, or for research developing a solution for a comp sci project (like an assignment to create a web-app for medical research.) Then there are the many journal archives one might need access too that some places can't afford to scan.

Yes, the Kindle is awesome, but lacks the pass around features paper books have (it's a friend/family tradition with books) b

So now we know why the cost if education keeps outpacing inflation by double digits. Because idiot administrators have no interest in education, rather, they wan to build giant monuments to themselves.

I look forward to the day that major university after major university goes bankrupt due to their profligate spending on crap like this.

There is such a thing as too much natural light. I'd bet that there are days when the glare in that library would make attempting to read anything nearly impossible. And moving enough air through that greenhouse^Wreading room to keep it cooled on a sunny day would cause enough noise to be one hell of a distraction. The architect probably has never spent much time in a library.

Why would you want a library to look like that? There's way too many people in that room.

Back when I was in college, when I went to the library to read stuff, I found chairs or tables that were nestled in the stacks of books, where there was no one around. It was easy to find such secluded spots to study in a big library where all the space was devoted to stacks of books, not some fancy automated system and an annoying "reading room" where you have to listen to everyone's noise.

That's actually a function of the skill of the librarian. You're depending on
the cataloging system to ensure that similar books end up next to each other
on the same shelf.

If you had a list of books (say electronic editions or scanned) and if
you could order them in the same way that they are ordered on the
library shelf, then you could browse a book's neighbourhood just the
same.

Setting up physical stacks so you can browse through them is a hardware solution to a software problem. Your average Slashdot reader could easily modify a library search engine so when you click on a book, it shows you a sidebar containing several books a semi-random distance away in Library of Congress number.

I'd be very curious to see how this system deals with peak load. Say, for some class a new assignment is given. You often find that all the students will start getting books in that area.

If it takes 5 minutes for every request, could see some big issues starting to pop up. I wonder if other students taking items from the 'bin' will muck things up? Are the bins even sorted by category, or just randomly?

Or even ignoring people trying to get books in the same area, in busy operating conditions, will this slow

I don't think your scenario of a bunch of requests aimed at a particular area of the stacks is even necessary to cause bottlenecks and delays in patrons getting materials from the stacks. There will never be enough robotic book pullers to match the amount of material that can be obtained by individuals walking through the stacks.

I am guessing the UofC has closed stacks otherwise this robotic system wouldn't make sense. Closed stacks, IMHO, suck like a tornado. They eliminate the serendipidous finds that y

But what I enjoy about say, going to one of the many libraries that my school operates - is having a list of a few books I want to check out, and browsing around where those books are found, finding additional books on the subject. This helps me find further research sources. I'm not sure how common that would be in all programs, but in History, it's quite a bit beneficial, or at least it has been for me...

My university library has placed some (and only some) books in a closed stack while larger facilities are being built, and it's apologizing profusely for the inconvenience. Closed stacks are not seen a desirable longterm situation in these parts.

Yup. Nothing like taking a book off the shelf, flipping through a few pages, putting it back, taking it off the shelf, flipping through a few pages, discovering something you want to read more about, and adding it to the back-breaking pile you have on the nearest table.

Yup. Nothing like looking for a book and, finding it missing from where it should be, having to search for five feet in each direction just to make sure some random browser didn't just shove it back into place.

The library online catalog where I live has a feature called "search nearby on the shelf" that shows you the books around your search result. If this kind of data is already being indexed, it seems like a simple matter to make a virtual representation of the shelf that you can browse with a mouse or a touch interface. It's not the same as being there but it can be approximated.

The library online catalog where I live has a feature called "search nearby on the shelf" that shows you the books around your search result. If this kind of data is already being indexed, it seems like a simple matter to make a virtual representation of the shelf that you can browse with a mouse or a touch interface. It's not the same as being there but it can be approximated.

It may be approximated, but it's a poor approximation.

The strength of being able to browse nearby books isn't just looking at the titles, but in being able to pick one up and flip through it and see if it's interesting. It's not quite the same if you see an interesting title, then have to wait 10 minutes for the robot to retrieve it for you.

Since they say each book bin holds around 100 titles, they could simulate this by putting the books into LC classification order in the book bin and letting you browse t

The books in the robot aren't going to be the ones you want to browse on the shelves--they are the endless bound serials, government financial statistics, etc. Moving them makes room to browse the stuff you want in the main library stacks.

My question would be, why aren't these things in digital form? If you've ever done any research, you'll know the signal to noise ratio can be quite low. It usually takes me scanning through 15-20 works before I find what I want. And to have to wait an hour to get your collection doesn't work.

I say, have the stacks if you want the physical copy. But everything should be digitized and searchable.

Maybe because it's much more impressive on the evening news for viewers to see pallets of bound printed government reports, statistics, and budget proposals being shipped to eagerly awaiting citizens and legislators. Seeing a box of CD-ROMs schlepped around would be boring. Showing a video of the government website and the link where you can download the documents would be even less impressive.

This is mostly because the world of university-level library management systems (a.k.a. integrated library systems) is heavily dominated by Voyager which was from Endeavor Information Systems and now is in the hands of the Ex Libris Group. There are a number of open source alternatives, but you can't seriously expect a big institution to use anything that doesn't require a huge contract for installation and support.

it's been so long i've forgotten most of it. but essentially there are a tangle of tables for various parts of a book record, and a bunch of proprietary indexing garbage. hell i even wrote a layer of python to talk to it... it interfaced with a layer of java that itnerfaced to an ODBC driver... anyways. they were using Oracle and Unix as a backend, but i didnt get to play with that part.

the other staff used to tell me that before they bought it, they went through this survey process; all the librarians and

It is very cool, but come on! People are struggling to afford college for their kids, and universities waste money like this?! Sorry, we have to raise tuition another 5%, we have to pay off this robotic library. And people complain about the oil companies...

The library cost a hefty $81 million, but the alternative was expanding the old library's capacity - and that was estimated at $67 million. So for $14 million, the university gets a brand new library with all the prestige and sex appeal of this new, high-tech approach with lower operating costs to boot. And anyway, the library's namesakes donated $25million, an amount that was probably increased by the prospect of the donator's getting to slap their name all over this exciting new building. What I'm saying is that this was a no-brainer for the university in terms of cost/benefit.

Now, whether you want to trade a building full of beautiful old books which you can peruse at your own convenience, and staffed with generally knowledgeable bibliophiles, for a mechanized building with 5-minute delay times on book requests and far fewer human employees... that's not so straightforward I hope.

Indeed the long run the robotic library will be cheaper. My alma mater started construction on one [ncsu.edu] just before I graduated and I heard a librarian talking about the new design. Robotic libraries allow a higher packing density (more books per cubic meter), save on climate control (no need to compensate for opening / closing doors, it's underground so well insulated, no windows), require far fewer lights (robots can work in the dark), reduce the number of employees needed to staff the place (a + or - depending on your point of view) among many other long-term cost-savings.

Robotic libraries allow a higher packing density (more books per cubic meter), save on climate control (no need to compensate for opening / closing doors, it's underground so well insulated, no windows), require far fewer lights (robots can work in the dark), reduce the number of employees needed to staff the place (a + or - depending on your point of view) among many other long-term cost-savings.

That's awfully convenient... for pretty much everyone but the students who need to browse through the stacks to do their research.

The ability to browse is the reason I still go to bookstores and libraries, even though almost every book you'd ever want is available online.

That's awfully convenient... for pretty much everyone but the students who need to browse through the stacks to do their research.

The ability to browse is the reason I still go to bookstores and libraries, even though almost every book you'd ever want is available online.

If you're browsing through stacks still, in this day and age, you're doing it wrong. In a world of databases and search functions, it's much more efficient to browse electronically, and request all the books you think are worth investigating. A well written search function, including related books (users who requested this book also requested X) would be much more useful than each individual having to manually perform the same search that 5,10,100 other people might have done.

True, although you could always design a nice "virtual bookshelf" type of interface for browsing titles in software. In fact, most library catalog search engines will show "other titles on the same shelf" by default. For example see this entry for Dune [ncsu.edu] and click on "Browse shelf" to the right of the page.

It is very cool, but come on! People are struggling to afford college for their kids, and universities waste money like this?! Sorry, we have to raise tuition another 5%, we have to pay off this robotic library. And people complain about the oil companies...

You have got to be kidding. This is exactly what Universities should be doing. Finding ways to preserve knowledge and make it available to whomever wants it. Until everything is digitized, this is a perfect way to make those books available in an as efficient a way possible. The students at the U of C are not about getting good grades and passing courses to get good jobs. They are about discovering and creating and investigating things that no one else has thought of yet. It's a research institution,

The students at the U of C are not about getting good grades and passing courses to get good jobs. They are about discovering and creating and investigating things that no one else has thought of yet. It's a research institution, not a tech school. And I wish we had more like it.

As a graduate of the University of Chicago, I'd have to say that, like many things, the perception is very different from reality. I'd say the vast majority of the student body, like at every school, are pretty average. It's not

however, you might wonder, why an organization that supposedly has limited budgets is spending money on these projects.

who benefits?

and who benefits when tuition goes up?

i humbly suggest learning about the mortgage market 2000-2008, then realizing the same thing is happening in education; hedge funds are creating a bubble so they can get rich. fuck the students, fuck the social contract. they bubble the student loan market; they securitize the loans, th

Because Sarah Palin, that's why. Because Glenn Beck. Because Creationist Museums where people ride their pet dinosaurs. Because a large chunk of the US actually got excited about the world ending last Saturday. Because.02 cents is not.02 dollars. Because we're fighting two majors wars and a skirmish in three countries most US citizens can't find on a map.

Because everyone gets to vote. Everyone needs to go to college?! If I had my way, college would be free and citizenship would require degrees in history, economics and science. Why on Earth wouldn't we want the electorate in charge of the largest supply of nuclear weapons on the planet to be as well educated as possible?

Most U.S. corporations that are big enough to hire decent accounting firms and lawyers are already paying far less than 35% in taxes. By some accounts, the average U.S. corporation is paying taxes in the area of 7%. I sure as hell wouldn't mind being taxed at that rate.

Taxes have been lowered on the so-called job creators for ten years now. Where are all the jobs that those lowered taxes were supposed to have created? Any why were there more jobs when taxes were much higher? (Fifty years or so ago, the top

This system caters to the individual who knows exactly which book they want, but what about us who like to have an idea, go to the section and browse around? I have frequently gone to the library with a vague idea of what I'm looking for and leaving with books for that topic, related topics and often just something that caught my eye. This "progress" undermines a lot of the value that a library presents.

Besides, if I know exactly what I want, I can use my computer and Amazon to get most things without bei

Personally, I love electronic search engines for the ability to get me exactly to exactly what I want. But until all books in libraries are full-digital and full-searchable, I like the browse feature. The Dewey Decimal system means that when I get interested in a subject because of one book, I can find similar books to expand my understanding. So when I know exactly what I want, bits are great. When I know sortof what I want, then the library is great. It also helps that I am cheap and when I don't kno

Not better search, but paper offers a better browsing experience. As noted in a number of other posts, this browsing can lead to the discovery of titles you didn't know existed. This is very beneficial to academic work.

As a University of Chicago student, something that I think many people won't take into consideration here is how the library is geared toward the student body. The majority of students use the library as a place to work, rather than a place to get books. And honestly, as someone who does a fair amount of (economic) research, I don't even go to the library until I know what book I'm going to get (I have access to the online library catalog). I think most students view the new library as a cool new place to do work, rather than another place to find books at.

Keep in mind, this is not really a book library. UChicago says it will "primarily house materials like serials, periodicals, and other materials that are already online, as well as rare and fragile materials that should not be kept on open shelves"

Becoming a librarian has been a pretty crappy career path for some time, involving long education to the M.Sc level only to receive poverty-level wages in many places. Now with mechanical systems, there's ever fewer job opportunities. The workforce at my university library has been heavily reduced in recent years.

Didn't you hear about the shortage? it's been going on for, I don't know, about 15 years now. A huge, massive retirement wave is hitting the librarian industry! You should definitely sign up for an MLS degree, ASAP! There, you can learn psychoanalytic theories about the hermeneutics of student based factors derived classroom application methods, from somebody who has never heard of Linux. Congratulations, you are well on your way to a noble profession, where you will work in a stultifying bureaucracy where

Look, even if you see this as a sign of technology, you can still commiserate a bit with people who have dedicated years to study only to find job opportunities are no longer there. You can also ponder if technological progress has meant there are less and less job opportunities. People have ever fewer jobs to retrain for. At some point robots might be doing the bulk of the work, and what's left is outsourced.

One of the benefits of sorted shelves are that you might find something you weren't looking for, but is related to what you were looking for. If I don't know which book is the best book on a subject, I'll just pick one and find it on the shelf, and look at the books near it on the shelf for something that looks appropriate to my level. I don't see how this is possible with a robot system.

My alma mater (California State University, Northridge) has had one of these for over 15 years (http://library.csun.edu/About/ASRS). Sure it's cool, but why do we care? It's nothing new or groundbreaking.

It is tempting to chalk this down to colossal stupidity and cluelessness, but that would be a mistake. Such a library can only have been designed by people who never go to libraries. However, as with most governmental or institutional actions that seem carried out by imbeciles, corruption is a far better explanation. Instead of allowing users to browse the stacks directly, examining book after book with related (or even serendipitously unrelated) information, you can now only get the exact book you asked fo

It's also why so many people buy and eat food that is bad for them. Why so many think they have to spend upwards of $70 for television or a similar amount for phone service. It's new! It's cool! You must have it! Now! Don't be the last one on your block to get it!

With the Internet, most research can be done online, with just occasional references to physical books. When that happens, it means you have to go wander the library and search through the shelves for the book. With the book found, you can head back to where you started (study/research group, computer, wherever) and continue.

This system cuts down the wandering in the library, the searching the shelves for the book, and possibly losing your spot

Step 1. login with your government provided username and passwordStep 2. click on the warning notice that says all your activity is monitored and unauthorized activity will be punishedStep 3. search for stuff.Step 4. try to tell yourself that everything you search for is not being stored in some database somewh

I like the overall idea, however according to the video, it seems like you still require librarians to sort through a bin of 100 books for the book you requested. I know that this is probably the first automated library of this scale, but if your going to spend the 81 million, you might as well make it totally automated without human interaction.

On a positive note, the library really does look like a library from the future. I would love to go there and read books on my eReader.

Well, probably handling a single book would add several degrees of complexity:

Book strength is determinated by the strength of paper while the container can be made of a sturdier materiel (and are easier to replace).

In order to select a single book, you cannot have them side-by-side as usual in libraries because it would be complicated to identify the item and it would be a lot more complicate to put it back in place (books at the side falling and all that stuff that is so easily handled by humans.

I bet you won't find it predicted in Astounding back in the 1940s that we'd have robotic fetchers by the year 2010.

Somebody in Chicago invented time travel back in 1940, zipped 70 years forward to see how humans and AI were getting along, saw the library, returned to the time of origin, then destroyed the machine, since the future was too sad to contemplate.

When manufacturing jobs started disappearing the comments from many were that everything was ok and that service related jobs would take their place, now the service related jobs seem to be going away too (McDonalds last week announced it was replacing cashiers with touch screen kiosks in 40,000 restaurants). What happens now? While I like progress and advancement in technology, it just doesn't seem to be very well thought out, if you eliminate jobs in the name of efficiency eventually you also end up eliminating a sizable portion of the customer base. You can have 100% efficiency but if there is no one left who can afford to buy what your selling your business is going to fail.

Sure, if you know what book you're looking for it's great. But if you're looking for something for which you may need to sort through a shelf or two of books, it seems like this would make it tougher to just pull a book down, browse through it, and move on to the next. I also remember many hours spent leafing through various works of fiction, looking for something I might enjoy reading by reading a few pages here and there to get a general idea of the author's style and the book's plot.

Except, when I'm in a library searching for a book, I often run across something sitting on the shelf, that I was not searching for, that is equally or more interesting. The filter bubble comes to the library. God forbid anyone should expand their horizons by reading something they were not originally looking for.

As for robotic personal shoppers, the same thing happens when I'm in a store. I often run across something I like, or something I forgot I needed while looking for something on my list.

Because ebooks often come with horrible DRM and/or onerous restrictions on resale and lending. Any library that considers itself to be a serious store of knowledge (as opposed to merely a resource for current patrons) will want to avoid that and right now for most titles the only way to avoid it is to stock paper copies.

Maybe a compromise could be to allow the library to keep DRM free copies internally but require them to use DRM when lending them out. Having a library lend out DRM free digital copies is pr

That day is today, and the device is a Kindle. Can hold literally years worth of books. Battery lasts a month. The library should have the stacks for sure, but you should also be able to click a button and have the digital version sent to you.

That's awesome. You're 100% correct. I don't know how books are sorted these days, but the relevancy of nearby books is why I attend libraries.

At my (European) university we have a system where, instead of one big library, we have many small, specialized libraries. This seems to work fairly well if the librarians are good... they keep the shelves updated and know what should go near what.